


Walking Day

by GreenElphaba



Category: Trigun (Anime & Manga)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:47:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28257903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreenElphaba/pseuds/GreenElphaba
Summary: Not the same universe as Pressure Tears. Takes place nebulously mid-series, established FWB. Anime canon more or less. Uh, a summary. Nicholas Wolfwood thinks too damn much, and definitely more than he prefers to let on.
Relationships: Vash the Stampede/Nicholas D. Wolfwood
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	Walking Day

He’s not quiet. Well, he’s *never* quiet, this guy, not really, except in the deep desert or the infrasound cradle of cars and buses, which seem to work on him like prayer does on you, expanding and silencing. His sounds pattern your days—chatter and sighs and the fidgeting of long limbs, the hard wall of untalk that surrounds him when he’s upset, so thick it’s like a sound itself, creeping into your head despite all you do to try and prevent it, upsetting you in turn. He’s as uninhibited in sex as he is when he cries, and as mildly, vividly inhuman. It’s surely inhuman never to be performative, if anything can be said to be inhuman at all, but more than that he never seems used to it, it’s new somehow every time and you don’t know what to do with that except try to match it, though you never feel you fully do. You have always been quiet in sex, unless the occasion calls for dirty talk, but he doesn’t like that so you try to make sound for him, at least at the end, show him that you’re really there, show him that it’s good.

You try to discourage him from dirty talk. The conversational signal, hunting through stations, lands on goofy as often as sexy and while you don’t mind laughing during sex, sometimes there isn’t time, or the walls are too thin, and it’s important to you both to keep this thing secret, though for different reasons. You’re good at people and it’s not hard to guess that he doesn’t want to revise his carefully-curated reputation, doesn’t want to field questions, or listen to a lecture, or worst of all endure the judgment of a good woman who won’t understand why the thing she’s been building in her mind isn’t real, can’t be real. You know perfectly well he intends to solve that problem by outliving it, or moving away from it, away from her. That’s how he tends to solve emotional problems, just lets the sand or the passage of time wear them away. You also know, although he’s never said so, that he was more than a little tempted to give in, let her build him a well-meaning coffin for another piece of his self. And as for you, well, you are still playing Judas in all of this, torn between love and fate, and while it remains to be seen if you will be condemned for your many sins or merely for your all-too-human lack of clarity, you do not need godlike prescience to know that the worst thing you could possibly do for your life expectancy would be to let Knives Millions know that his brother might cry if you died.

You do love him, God help you. You are one of the wretched, a contrarian gasp of consciousness and a pair of hands, nothing more, and you will most assuredly die by the sword, so you shouldn’t love anything, least of all him. But you do—in part because he’s trying so hard, and in a lot of ways failing as severely as his brother, albeit far less spectacularly. And you love him in part because someone has to and you do believe that no one else really does, because real love requires real sight and you are maybe the only one who has ever really seen him. Certainly his twin doesn’t. Nor did the Sacred Woman, whose name you won’t say even in your thoughts, though you know it, in case it coalesces your mild, amused spite into real hatred, which you very much suspect it might. And Meryl, who shouldn’t even feel like a rival, certainly doesn’t see him and therefore doesn’t love him, but it’s still hard not to see that nebulous nonstarter of a relationship as a real threat, sanctioned by the world in a way your own never would be. And you love him in part because you have appointed yourself the emissary of humanity and it is therefore yours to close the terrible gap between his love for humanity and their hatred of him. You don’t believe in the sanctity of sacrifice and so you don’t draw parallels between your profession and what your mouth does on scarred skin, in the last drops of the desert night, or it might be more accurate to say you *won’t* draw such parallels. But mostly you just love him because he’s lovable, because you cannot help yourself any more than an animal can help savaging itself when caught in a trap. He smiles a certain way and your heart spills out like water and your throat aches, because you’ve known since you were young that love is all you have and that it is not enough. You will not be able to save him. But you are trying, racing against time to try and unpick the knots inside his head, help him understand there are other ways to live, help him bend before his brother breaks him. You feel like you are locked in some grim unspoken combat, not with Knives—although you are that, too—but with the Sacred Woman, at whose feet you could lay so, so much. Every scar. It’s probably a good thing you’ll never meet her, that despite the persistence of her ghost inside your lover’s head she died a hundred years before you were even born. Hell, she’s probably been reincarnated. You haven’t said that to Vash, you’re quite sure it would start him looking for her, and he doesn’t need that distraction any more than you need that ulcer.

Today is a walking day; you are following a broad back, clad in red, and thinking long thoughts that cling to you like jumbled nets of faith and fear and dog-ends of philosophy. Vash has asked you before, a little nervously, a little defensively, if you think he is an angel, and you told him no. No was what he needed to hear and more importantly it’s the only answer that makes sense, that can be thought over and grasped and worked with. And Vash, bless him, does not have the sense to put a gun to your head and demand the truth, because then he would know just how often you lie about things, and he would have to know that you are certain he *is* an angel, or perhaps more appropriately a nephil. The idea that the great and terrible messengers of God should be found enslaved by the human race in these latter days does not surprise you at all, the notion swims in your faith without leaving a ripple. The universe breaks apart, God divides and sub divides and becomes, diversifying into oblivion as the universe slowly feeds itself into the waiting jaws of entropy, and here in the Hell that is Gunsmoke, the last and least-bitter intersection between man and angel wears size 11s and goes melting-still when your mouth fastens to his throat. If you knew where to point your rage, if you could draw your guns on fate itself, oh you would. You would work the red scream of pain that is your human birthright upon the entire uncaring universe if you could, for him.

You can’t, so you stop walking to light a cigarette, and he stops walking too, turning to look back at you. You didn’t expect that and so you let your shades slide down your sweaty nose and ask, “What is it, spiky?”  
He gives you a look, one of the ones that might be real or might not be. “I can FEEL you staring at me. You’re not still mad we got tossed off that bus, are you?”  
You decide it’s not a real look, just banter. “Ya mean, that ya got us tossed off the bus?” You ask, mumbling around the butt in your teeth. “Nah, perish the thought. And perish us while you’re at it, in this shitty badland. Ya know breathing silica dust is bad for ya, right?”  
“I didn’t ask you to follow me,” Vash points out. “And if you’re going to stare heavily at my back all day, I’m going to start wishing you hadn’t.”  
“So walk beside me,” you suggest, and put your lighter away, and shoulder the Punisher again. “Besides, I’m just thinkin about everything I’m gonna do to ya tonight.” He likes your accent, so you’ve been letting your diction slip when it’s just the two of you, undoing years of hard work by well-meaning seminary teachers to train you out of sounding like a Decemberan hick all the time.  
“Walk faster and catch up,” Vash tells you, and starts moving again, long legs eating up the iles one by one.  
You cuss at him under your breath, because it’s too perfect, you sometimes have to wonder how much of what he says is calculated and how much is just intuition like a lightning strike. Or maybe you’re just reading too much into it and he doesn’t know how often you feel you’ve spent your life doing just that, chasing the specter of him down a dark alley of mutation and violence. Vash the Stampede shaped your life years before you ever met him, years before you even knew his name, but some things are better not thought about even in the baking breadth of the desert, birthplace of all the best spiritual maundering. You open your stride and catch up, and he gives you a grin that you return with an exaggerated grimace. He laughs, as you hoped he would, and for today at least things will be all right, the desert is as much your friend as your enemy, it is a long way to the next town and you will have him to yourself for perhaps three stolen nights more. You choose not to wonder if he did it on purpose, manufactured the fracas that got you turned off the bus and away from the insurance girls, because the thought that he might want this time as much as you do is one of those heart-spilling thoughts you can’t bear.

So you walk.


End file.
